VDP-3 VitaDAO Tokenomics Proposal

The core difference is that SPs helped build VitaDAOs core infrastructure for WGs to emerge on. The goal with this token economic distribution is for WGs to take over infrastructure development.

IMO in many cases the work that SPs have delivered, including their teams who receive salaries, is disproportionate to working groups allocations, meaning WGs own more for their future work. Additionally, you will see that SP members who worked in multiple working groups, like Tyler Golato or Theodor Walker, are removed entirely from WG allocations to match this.

Do you suggest increasing working group lead allocations? I.e. your allocation goes to 0.75 - 1.5% of the total longevity WG budget? IMO that would put a massive strain on budget.

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VDP 3.1 Tokenomics Proposal Amendment

Based on final input from the community, VitaDAO is putting up the following genesis tokenomics for vote by VITA genesis token holders based on feedback on VDP3: VDP-3 VitaDAO Tokenomics Proposal.

The allocations below differentiate minimally from VDP3 but aim to finalise allocations and introduce global governance invitations and lock-up schedules.

This vote aims to determine the allocations of 1) VitaDAO working groups, VitaCore leaders and VitaDAO Genesis Contributors and; 2) VitaDAO Infrastructure Service Providers.

1 Distribution and lock-up:

All VITA allocations below follow a global governance invitation determined by VitaDAO upon approval of VITA token holders. All allocations herein shall be granted 40% upon on-chain DAO approval, with the remaining 60% being linearly distributed via the VitaDAO Multisig for continued support over a period of 12 months.

VitaDAO thanks each and every one of the organizations and individuals that helped bring it to life.

2 Working Groups:

VitaDAO proposes to provide working groups with the following genesis allocations:

VitaCore allocations to working group stewards are proposed as follows:

Of total genesis working group allocations, 500,000 VITA are proposed to be allocated to over 30 individuals and contributors who helped the VitaDAO core genesis, as outlined in VDP3. These core allocations will derive from the working group budgets.

3 Service Providers

Beyond working group members, service providers contributed their teams, resources and efforts to bring VitaDAO to this point without receiving allocations from working groups.

Many working group allocations such as technical or tokenomics remain unclaimed, as Service Providers provided the core infrastructure and consulting services to enable a genesis. As such, they are not included via WG budgets but are distributed via SPs.

Genesis allocations for Service Providers are proposed as follows to participate in VitaDAO governance. They follow the same vesting provisions as Working Groups.

The remaining 1.0% of SP allocations is proposed to be reserved for the initial IP NFT transfer and acquisition of the Copenhagen research project, which is to be presented in a separate proposal.

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I’m not convinced sufficient information has been presented to make a qualified decision on the proposed token allocations.

For the DAO to make such decisions on an informed basis, the contribution of each party should be more transparent.

This is particularly important, as the amount due to be distributed is large (at $1 USD/token, ViteCore allocations alone account for $1.8M USD).

Having followed every post on Discord and Telegram for well over a month, it is unclear how each party listed in this proposal has contributed to the DAO (e.g. you would expect someone who is the Lead of the Awareness Working Group to be visible in the community). Consequently, I encourage more visibility into how the Working Groups operate, including how their respective members contribute.
Overall, this would benefit the general modus operandi of the DAO, but is particularly important in light of a token allocation vote.

Moreover, I would propose a 1-year cliff and a longer vesting period (4 years is standard in the startup world and seems more reasonable to me). The proposed vesting schedule seems rather short-sighted, especially in light of the long time-horizon of longevity research projects.

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This is a very valid concern, I agree with your there. I’ll need to think about how to best resolve this and share my thoughts later today.

For context, I’d like to add that the VitaDAO community was rather closed until the public launch - and still is in many ways. Specifically, working group channels on Discord are and have always been closed, so there is currently no way to have insights into contributions to such private channels unless you are a working group member.

Fully agree. The question of If and how to open up working group channels is an ongoing discussion and could resolve this partially. The current idea is to open up all working groups at least as read-only channels, except two that are potentially sensitive (legal and deal negotiations), but this is all open for feedback and to be decided by the DAO.

Similarly, some research work took place on Google Docs which are semi-private too - only refined drafts and further discussions are publicly visible on Discourse.

Also, a lot of development work took place outside GitHub or in private repositories. VitaDAO’s GitHub was made public only shortly after the public launch.

These are just my ad-hoc observations of how things are, but of course no satisfying response to your questions. We’ll need to tackle each of these issues and make them more transparent.

Again, you have a point. What do others think are appropriate periods of time?

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Agree with Theo and valid questions raised @senso! It’s easier to see from the inside how much effort were put into all aspects, from gov, tech, awareness to longevity, thus also agree that we should open up some more working groups (read-only for non-working group members to reduce noise).

One problem with a much longer cliff+vesting is that no working group member could be an active participant in governance and also the comparison with startups breaks in the sense of that startup employees are highly compensated additionally which working group members are not (so we can’t expect all contributors to wait 2-4yrs to receive a payment for their services)

Coming from the crypto space, the compensations look pretty low on comparative basis to me if one considers the efforts/hours put in, and the uncertainty/illiquidity of selling in years, there is 0 payment for most working group contributors and all is reliant on a long-term appreciation of Vita, no one knew if Vita would raise enough funding while they contributed weeks/months of work.

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Thank you @Senso for raising these questions! I think we are all aligned with the longevity of this DAO (pun intended) and we’re not planning to sell.

I’d like to hear ideas from the whole community on how we could have lock-ups that allow voting but not selling. Of course, we can unlock a small % of the vested tokens to be sold, just for regular salary-like expenses, especially for those of us that are focused on this full time.

So vesting of locked tokens for voting on the one hand and a secondary unlock-vesting of tokens that can be sold.

Out of the box thinking encouraged! <3

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I really like the idea of distributing a certain proportion of tokens that allow voting but not selling during this pivotal early phase. If a working group member does not intend to sell in the short term, such a lock-up shouldn’t make a difference to that person. However, it will instill a sense of confidence in the VitaDAO team and project to people that aren’t recipients of the working group token allocations.
This approach should also address @vincent’s points regarding liquidity and compensation uncertainty.

Also very happy to hear that there is talk to opening up the working groups (at least making most of them “read only”). That should help drive more engagement and confidence in the DAO.

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Fully agree with @Senso

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Curve Labs worked on an implementation of API3DAO’s Aragon smart contracts to allow exactly this. It took a while but it’s done now (there was also a staking module… basically not only were vested tokens able to be voted with, you could stake them too and earn rewards).

We’ve had some internal discussions on how to do this in a more lightweight manner rather than a bespoke implementation… our idea was/is to issue a separate governance token whose balances can be adjusted by some controller. The gov token issuance would match 1::1 vested tokens + held tokens; then you can use Snapshot with the gov token. But this still requires someone to run a script each month/voting cycle and adjust. So it’s not super-lightweight.

Re: vesting times — three years tends to be the max in crypto. Two is more common.

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Regarding opening up WG convos…

I might be in the minority here but I believe the privacy of WG convos is more important than “opening them up.” Typically when small, specialized groups of people have a safe and specific space to talk, they are more candid about the options and strategy and are able to land on an effective solution together. There’s this line of thinking with “social control surfaces” in Web3 that everything should be fully transparent all the time, but that invites a lot of noise and sometimes (often?) causes less engaged folks to overreact (esp. token holders).

If you think about it, there’s a reason most corporations control PR and information flow for certain accounts (i.e. having an account manager control information flow with client). It helps protect + sustain alpha for that org. Good thoughts take time to formulate and all it takes is one hypercritical or uneducated voice in a small group setting to completely derail the success of that group (and burn out the other folks, who are usually experts in their field, and do not have time to deal with problem people…)

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Re: this…

I really think token allocation is being mishandled for WG members. My perspective is that they should be paid in stablecoins until VitaDAO has its first IP / products available. Paying folks completely in “liquid equity” (this is what tokens are today) doesn’t make any sense if you want to see an appreciation of price for that equity (which every nascent org does). Note that I think they should also be compensated in VITA, as the proposal suggests — these combined incentives would establish a competitive rate.

VitaDAO has funding. It doesn’t need to put price pressure on VITA. It can afford to pay all of its contributors more than a liveable wage.

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agree, for some working groups like legal it makes sense to stay private for working group members, and for others like tech we actively want to open it completely up. having it on read-only and write only for members will help regarding less noise.

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think most people have enough resources to sustain their expenses, and are very long-term aligned with vitadao

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Good point — it might depend on the person.

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Really good points raised here, thank you for contributing @Senso @papa_raw and others.

We will be writing a blog post to provide more transparency on the proposed allocations and overall tokenomics design thinking. Many of VitaDAOs core processes ran via working groups that formed through open source contributions but operated privately (DMs, closed WGs), and the infrastructure for the DAO was built by service providers who put their teams and resources on this for many months without knowing if it would work. This needs to be explained to the community to enable trust in this design and VITA genesis contributors.

I think the question around unlocking tokens for governance to enable VitaCore, working groups and service providers is crucial. Together with the legal working group, these governance allocations will be distributed via a social consensus mechanism enforced by the multisig.

In the current proposal, 40% of allocations will be unlocked on launch and 60% vesting linearly over 1 year.

The 60% allocated to each individual and service provider will remain with VitaDAOs multisig to be issued monthly. Vesting tokens are issued monthly on the basis that the recipient:

  • Only uses their VITA in governance activities via the staking contract, not in financial activities;
  • Continues to support VitaDAOs activities to the best of their ability;
  • Adheres to the VitaDAO code of conduct.

In practice, if someone decided to discontinue their support, or sell VITA they may forfeit their tokens.

Thus, any allocations made herein could be called into question should recipients not respect the governance invitation letter. The process for this could be a public proposal, a community discussion etc. but rests fully with the DAO and token holder decision making. The goal of this is to create an open and engaged community of genesis contributors and continue the culture that brought the DAO to inception. I’d posit that 98% of core contributors are known as VitaDAO was not built on the typical anon/DeFi culture.

The Legal Working group should provide the details of the governance invitation letter asap to provide clarity here.

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Agree! Great points and great proposal to make people commit to hold!

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I’d recommend simplifying this release schedule for yourselves and just use Sablier to stream the tokens with the same emissions schedule (there is a Gnosis Safe app for this)

Screenshot:


. You only need to make TX vs. monthly issuance.

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Small mixup correction: It says decentralized matter did DevOps, that was never the case, that was Linum

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For the phase 3 vote on this proposal VDP-3, I’m proposing to fill the template as follows:

{
  "proposal_type": "governance",
  "title": "VDP-3 VitaDAO Tokenomics Proposal, with VDP 3.1 Tokenomics Proposal Amendment",
  "summary": "A description of the nature of the VITA token, its supply and the proposed genesis distribution including allocations to genesis contributors, working groups, service providers as well as the VitaDAO treasury.",
  "details": "### VITA token \n * VITA is obtained by contributing work, data, IP, or funds to VitaDAO \n * The core function of VITA is to curate the best longevity IP and fund novel open science data creation around it \n * VITA tokens grant the rights to participate in a) which IP is funded; b) how it is funded; c) how it is governed; d) how the VitaDAO treasury is governed \n * VITA is designed following a sustainability loop principle \n ### Genesis \n * VitaDAO’s token supply is capped at the number representing the lifespan in minutes of the oldest person to have lived, which at the time of publication is Jeanne Louise Calment with more than 122 years \n * Therefore, VitaDAO’s token supply is 64,298,880 VITA \n * 6,435,936 VITA, about 10%, have already been allocated to the community through a Gnosis Auction \n * 5,786,899.2 VITA, about 9%, will be allocated to service providers upon passing of this proposal, while another 1% to be allocated to the Copenhagen research project upon passing of the corresponding proposal, [VDP-5](https://gov.vitadao.com/t/vdp-5-scheibye-knudsen-lab-funding-proposal/188) \n * 6,429,888 VITA, about 10%, will be allocated to working groups upon passing of this proposal \n * 44,991,072 VITA, about 70%, will be allocated to the treasury upon passing of this proposal \n *  All allocations herein shall be granted 40% upon on-chain DAO approval, with the remaining 60% being linearly distributed via the VitaDAO Multisig for continued support over a period of 12 months \n ### More information \n For the full proposal with more details, see the following link.",
  "link": "https://gov.vitadao.com/t/vdp-3-vitadao-tokenomics-proposal/64",
  "project": {}
}
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